Whose and What Rights?

Human rights are being violated every day in U.N. member countries by the leaders of those countries that enjoy to mingle with the advocates of human rights in New York at every one of the global hollow get togethers of global leaders to celebrate something or other that was just as meaningless and hollow as the previous soirée. This is nothing new. The Khmer Rouge butchery in Cambodia’s killing fields, was not stopped by the U.N., no different than the genocide in Darfur.

The Khmer Rouge leaders escaped being tried for their murderous politically motivated rampage, because the U.N. repeatedly delayed establishing the tribunal agreed to try them. Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge leader who died in 2006, had ousted Pol Pot in 1997 and was the group’s final leader. He had been held in a military prison since 1999.

The New-York based Open Society Justice Initiative wants a probe into corruption allegations against judges of the long-awaited and long-overdue Khmer Rouge tribunal. It cites allegations “that Cambodian court personnel, including judges, must kick back a significant percentage of their wages to Cambodian government officials in exchange for their positions on the court.”

Up to two million people were executed or died of starvation and overwork between 1975 and 1979, when the communist Khmer Rouge forced millions into the countryside in their drive for an agrarian utopia.

Human rights are still being violated on a systemic scale by Cambodia’s Hun Sen government. According to Yash Ghai, the U.N. secretary general’s special representative for human rights in Cambodia. In The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Cambodia he released on September 26, 2006, he said: “With aid-giving comes the responsibility to ensure that it helps the people. The international community in Cambodia must give far higher priority to human rights and actively advocate for their implementation.” He concluded the government manipulates the democratic process, undermines legitimate political opposition, uses the state to accumulate private wealth, with no rule of law, property rights, or independent judiciary. Illegal land expropriations go unpunished and unpaid for. Thousands of families have been forcibly evicted from land their families have lived on for generations. In some cases, entire communities have collapsed as a result, since their whole existence was organized around this land.